Saturday Afternoon Links

This and that for your weekend reading.

- Thomas Walkom tries to be optimistic about the year ahead, and likely settles on the best reason for hope that Canada's politics will see some change for the better:

Canada, like Australia and Brazil, is getting by on sales of raw materials whose prices are kept high by seemingly insatiable Chinese demand.

But the key word here is “seemingly.” The world has seen so-called Asian miracles before, starting with Japan in the 1980s and running through various so-called Tigers such as Thailand in the ’90s.

In the end, these miracles proved less than miraculous. And unless China’s Communist leadership has discovered how to operate a capitalist economy without boom and bust, the same must inevitably happen there — with effects that will ricochet across the globe.

Politically, Canada has entered a kind of deep freeze. The New Democrats have discovered, to their horror, that gaining official Opposition status at a time of majority government is largely meaningless.

The NDP hopes this will change when it chooses a permanent leader in March. To the extent that Parliament gives political leaders a pulpit, the party’s optimism is not entirely misplaced.

- But Joseph Stiglitz points out that a complete lack of perspective as to the relative importance of financial-sector profits and social priorities figures to be a problem for a long time to come.

- Alice dissects Nathan Cullen's joint nomination proposal:

It's a big leap to assume that the public will be accepting of a process run by a tiny proportion of the whole riding population to conspire to eliminate certain choices from the ballot in the hopes of torquing the election outcome. It's another big leap to assume that this would be done in a vacuum, given that the Conservative Party would be following along closely, and reserving all their strategic and tactical options.

Of course, for the NDP and the other parties, there are other strategic and tactical considerations, such as:

* would it actually even work, or would enough orphaned voters switch to the Conservatives or stay home if their preferred choice was not on the ballot?
* is it democratic or politically wise to be advocating the elimination of political choice for the public by a small group of political activists
* in particular could the NDP then run as effectively as one of the two main choices in the "consideration set" of the general election (a term coined by Innovative Research's Greg Lyle to describe the process by which consumer choice is whittled down to two viable choices, and drawing parallels to voting behaviour), if it was at the same time enabling the election of one of its non-"consideration set" competitors.
* tactically, what criteria would be applied for deciding whether a joint nomination would achieve the intended result or not in a riding with newly formed boundaries
* what is the cost-benefit analysis of foregoing the opportunity to build in that riding next time, foregoing the room under the national spending ceiling (which is affected by how many candidates a party runs in an election), and foregoing the rebate, organizational opportunities and other team-building in a riding association that result from waging a local campaign, even if it doesn't win, as against the probability of being able to defeat the incumbent in a riding

- Finally, Occupy Vancouver tracks the social benefits provided by its camp.